And I vaguely recall something syntactically similar. From an author I admire. Maybe ADF.
Hm. The author I'm currently editing for doesn't (typically) take it to that degree, but he tends toward shorter paragraphs, and while sometimes it's done for emphasis, other times it seems as though he feels as though he thinks he's supposed to insert a paragraph break anytime there's a shift in perspective. Especially where this has resulted in single-paragraph sentences, I've been encouraging him to merge them together, and pointing out that while single-sentence paragraphs can work for action or to emphasize things, the more you do it, the less impactful it becomes.
Wow, please blame my grammar on the awful head-cold I've been dealing with this week!
Wow, please blame my grammar on the awful head-cold I've been dealing with this week!
If by perspective you mean he's moving from one character's point of view to another, there should certainly be a break to help the reader follow... but why change perspective so often?
Yeah... in modern writing convention, one generally sticks with a single character's POV within a scene, then inserts a break and starts a new scene to shift to a different character's POV.
Paragraph breaks are for shifts from one concept or subject to another, or from one character's dialogue to another. Perhaps DonIago meant a shift in focus/topic rather than a shift in character perspective?
Well, in Coover's "The Babysitter," the changes of POV (escalating into changes of reality) were the whole point. But he did have paragraph breaks at every shift (and a shift at just about every paragraph break)
Again, please excuse any poorly expressed thoughts here...this cold has given me unending sinus pressure for about a week now...
I agree in principle that paragraph breaks are approprirate when there's a shift in perspective or such, so I may have explained that badly.
The books I'm editing are fantasy-adventure and typically involve a party adventuring together (I've found myself thinking on occasion that my author may have created too many characters to effectively balance them), but what I've found my author doing a few times is things like...
(three-sentence paragraph 'establishing shot' of new area)
(one-sentence paragraph of character reacting to seeing the new area)
While that's arguably a 'change in perspective' in the sense that it's going from establishing the area to getting inside one character's head to say what they think of the area that's been established, IMO in such a case a single-sentence paragraph probably isn't merited, and it makes just as much sense to add it to the end of the prior paragraph...or, perhaps better, restructure the paragraph to be entirely from that character's perspective.
I'm not sure whether this helps explain my concern or not; my goal was just to say that I understand what the prior poster was talking about with staccato sentences or paragraphs when there would probably be nothing lost by consolidating them, and how while doing staccato can work well for action sequences, it loses impact if/when it's overdone.
I don't know... it depends on the specific case. It could well be that the character's thoughts or feelings about the setting are significant enough to warrant a separate paragraph, so it stands out more.
There's no rule saying that paragraphs have to be a certain length. Indeed, it's better to have variety. And it's better to go with what feels right in a given instance than to impose some generic rule on everything.
I hope you're feeling better soon, DonIago.
Thank you!
I think I'm feeling a bit better today, maybe. My head was so plugged up that I laid off the editing altogether until Thursday night because I didn't think I'd be able to do a good job of it, and thinking is still taking more effort than it should.
Christopher: I saw your message but don't really have much to say in response beyond, "Yep, I agree with all of that." It wouldn't be proper of me to quote the manuscript I'm editing so I could provide a more clear example, so if my last couple of posts on the matter didn't really illustrate my point well enough, it's probably best to move on anyway.
Years ago I read a book about the Sherlock Holmes Canon (I think it was The Great Detective: The Amazing Rise and Immortal Life of Sherlock Holmes by Zach Dundas, but I no longer have my copy and can't double check) that made an interesting point I'd never considered before: The Sherlock Holmes stories became period pieces while Doyle was still writing them.
Doyle killed off Holmes in "The Final Problem," a story he wrote in 1893 that was set in 1891, so more or less contemporary with when he wrote it. Most of the Holmes stories until that point took place at most eight years before their publishing date. Doyle wrote The Hound of the Baskervilles from 1901 to 1902, but it was a flashback story set in the same 1880s period most of the other Holmes stories had been set.
When Doyle finally revived Holmes for real in "The Empty House" in 1903, it was set in 1894. After that, most Holmes stories were set in the Victorian era, anywhere from the 1880s to the early 1900s. And Doyle kept periodically writing Sherlock Holmes stories until 1927, by which point they were set up to 30-40 years before.
That was part of why Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat decided to make their Sherlock TV series set in the present day. Because he was a contemporary character when he was first published.
By making a series set in the present day but using the same characters/names, you create a world in which the original probably doesn't exist, and you avoid having everybody compare detective ________ who acts and thinks like Holmes to Holmes by name constantly. (e.g. "You're a regular Sherlock Holmes.")
Part of the reason that the BBC Sherlock series chose to film street scenes on North Gower Street instead of the modern day Baker Street is because of the sheer number of tourist spots with the Sherlock Holmes name on them that were visible on the real life Baker Street. It would've been too impractical to remove all that signage for location shoots.
Of course, a show can still play with the idea anyway by creating a Holmesish lit character obviously intended to be whatever replaced him in the show's continuity.
Yeah, that can get weird sometimes. One example was the Japanese series Miss Sherlock, whose Sherlock equivalent was a present-day Tokyo-dwelling woman named Sara Shelly Futaba who went by the nickname Sherlock (Shaarokku), though it was a universe where Holmes didn't exist as a fictional character, so why she was nicknamed Sherlock was never explained. (By contrast, her Watson equivalent was Wato Tachibana, who was addressed occasionally as "Wato-san.")
It's also a bit self-contradictory, since the Holmes stories played a role in popularizing forensic and investigative methods that were eventually adopted by the police. So a universe where there was no Sherlock Holmes, fictional or otherwise, in the 19th and early 20th century might be one where police forensic methods are less advanced, but modern Holmes shows tend to show the cops using those methods regularly.
-- Signor Emanuel Ravelli (Leonard "Chico" Marx), Animal Crackers.
Arthur also did this. In "The Contest", the kids watch a show featuring characters that look like them, but are other animals, and that show runs a contest for viewers to make up ideas for episodes. Our characters enter, only to find out years later that the winner was someone else (who shares the name with the person who won Arthur's contest to think up an episode idea. Their winning idea? A story about a TV show idea contest.) (Confused yet?)
The Arthur characters' ideas were animated in styles resembling other popular cartoons at the time.
The Arthur characters' ideas were animated in styles resembling other popular cartoons at the time.
I suspect this one reason a lot of zombie apocalypse stories avoid using the Z-word. Because the idea that an actual zombie apocalypse takes place in a reality in which zombie apocalypses are already a subgenre strains belief. Unless the characters are invoking traditional Haitian zombies for some reasons.
No more than, say, astronauts flying rockets to the Moon in a reality where there had been a whole subgenre of sci-fi stories about astronauts flying rockets to the Moon. Or a fascist takeover of the government taking place in a reality where the previous 80 years of fiction was full of cautionary tales about a fascist takeover of the government.
The thing to say in such stories is just that there's a disease or mutation or whatever that mimics the traditional symptoms of zombie stories. That's how the iZombie TV series did it, for instance. Heck, the modern "Romero" zombie is a conceptual descendant of the vampires in Matheson's I Am Legend, which used that same rationale, that they were victims of a disease that mimicked the traditional traits of vampirism.
I mentioned Miss Sherlock before, a Sherlock Holmes pastiche in a reality where there's no Sherlock Holmes. In contrast, there's a Japanese series of books and movies called Columbo of Shinano, but it's about a detective who's a big fan of Columbo and models himself after the fictional character's look and behavior.
Easiest way to attack a zombie is with a tall glass.
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